I understand why people might want to distance themselves from Ubuntu and Unity. (It is also worth noting that Unity has attracted a lot of new users and foremost, a lot of
new team members).
There are many reasons why Canonical pushed Unity:
1- You cannot beat Microsoft at their own game.
Ubuntu is officially set out to beat Microsoft in the PC desktop market share. (It's their
forever unresolved bug #1). Gnome2 and KDE4, do a great work at providing a Windows desktop replacement for linux distributions (Gnome even has a program
that emulates a Windows registry). However they will always be limited by the comparisons. Canonical is realizing that if it wants to play that game, it has to differentiate itself from the existing. Ironically, the Gnome3 release does fulfill this goal as well (and probably better than Unity). Is Canonical showing signs of Apple-like "control freak" philosophy?
Note that while they are distancing themselves from Windows(-XP-like) UI and the
traditional desktop, they are distancing themselves from the core Unix philosophy as well. It's very similar to what Mac OS X did over 10 years ago, although it's the first time a Linux distribution does it. I guess that Unix cannot work on the desktop. The winning company will learn what to take from it and what to drop.
2- Not just a PC.
Canonical (just like any player in the field,
namely Microsoft) knows that the PC is, if not dying, the most boring platform around. Nothing is really going to change there, you cannot move a long established leader. Mobiles, smartphones, tablets are booming, and no real leader has emerged yet.
Gnome and KDE don't work well outside the PC (after all, they're mainly
desktop environments), whereas Unity does. Canonical has officially started
two projects that give Unity a real purpose. The goal is to stretch a unified GUI on the desktop, the phone, the TV, ...
Another distro?
It seems to me that you're not fed up with Ubuntu as much as you are with Unity. Instead of looking for another distro, you could simply look for alternative desktop environments (remember, the desktop environment is just one part of the distro).
Here are the most famous Ubuntu spinoffs:
-
Xubuntu: using the
Xfce desktop environment. It provides a lightweight alternative to the big and fat traditional desktops.
-
Kubuntu: based on
KDE, a full-fledged desktop environment. I particularly recommend this desktop for those interested in developing desktop apps with Qt (Qt and KDE have a very strong historical relationship). Also note that earlier this month Canonical (regrettably) announced that they will
drop the funding for the Kubuntu project after version 12.04.
-
Lubuntu: based on
LXDE, it's even more lightweight than Xfce. I remember running it with 128MB of memory. It's not a desktop environment as much as a simple window manager. If you're interested I could go into the details of the difference.
-
Ubuntu Studio: A remastered Ubuntu spin-off, focusing on audio features. For the longest time it shipped a real-time kernel for better audio rendering, but now apparently the new standard kernel is pretty great and works well.
There are a few other spinoffs, but I don't think you'd be
interested in them.
Also a final note, there are plenty of other distributions than Ubuntu. And generally speaking, all the mentionned desktop environments (Gnome, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE) as well as many others, are available on all distros.
For general-purpose computing, I suggest you take a look at
Fuduntu, a Fedora clone with heavy focus on user experience.